2025 05 25

Why I’m reading and thinking about psychoanalysis so much

About a year after I became a manager, I asked myself why dysfunctional organizations are dysfunctional—what makes them that way, and why it’s so hard for them to change. I sort of piddled around in the popular leadership literature—Peter Drucker, Patrick Lencioni, Brenë Brown, Amy Edmondsen, a few others—but while they all had interesting ideas, no one had a compelling story about what made organizations dysfunctional. Even Lencioni, who’s made a career out of diagnosing particular dysfunctions and fixing them, has little to say.

The basic problem was that dysfunction is a feature of groups, but the leadership literature is focused overwhelmingly on features of individuals—specifically, leaders. And millions of dollars spent training leaders about building trust and fostering psychological safety and being decisive and on and on doesn’t seem to have advanced our understanding at all.

So I started looking at the literature on group dynamics. This didn’t get me much further, until I came across a very old study of nurses in a teaching hospital by a psychologist named Isabel Menzies. Menzies had been assigned the task of finding out why the hospital was losing nurses at such a high rate, and she observed something striking about all the various ways in which the nurses as a group were so dysfunctional: each of the dysfunctional behaviors helped protect the nurses from the severe emotional distress that comes with being a nurse. And the nurses seemed to be unconsciously colluding to preserve the dysfunction.

It seems obvious to me now, but in all my reading and thinking about dysfunction, it had simply never occurred to me that whether a group is dysfunctional depends on what the group's function is: that what the leadership of a teaching hospital considers dysfunctional may, in a different context, make perfect sense.

Much of what makes a group work the way it does happens without the individual members being aware of it. So rather than asking what makes the group dysfunctional, let’s ask why the group members work together to make the group work the way it’s working right now. That’s not an easy question to answer, but clearly there is an answer. And we can learn the answer by learning why the group members are doing what they’re doing, as members of the group. Then, if we want to change the behavior of the group, we at least have a fighting chance, because we know what’s actually driving its members.